Hello, New Readers!

Welcome to world of BLADE MAIDENS! Valentine and I are unbelievably excited for y’all to join us and follow Ser and Rowan’s story.

Blade Maidens is a romantic fantasy adventure webcomic starring two lesbians and their swords. That’s it! All done! Go home!

More? Okay, FINE. This 3-part prelude, while the first adventure we’ve released, is not the beginning of Ser and Rowan’s history together. We’ll reveal more of the Blaidens’ history as a mercenary duo and watch their relationship unfold as the story goes on. For now, we want to promise a few things upfront:

1. Ser and Rowan will kiss. This isn’t a will-they-won’t-they romance, we give you our word here and now it is gonna happen. It’s not going to happen right away (we’ve gotta keep you reading somehow) but you have our solemn vow that these idiots are gonna kiss and THEN SOME.
2. There isn’t any outright transphobia/homophobia in this story. Fantasy stories that include these real-world elements are absolutely acceptable takes on the genre, and can be fantastic, this just isn’t one of them. There’s plenty of reasons but, honestly, we have to deal with that shit in our actual lives on a day-to-day basis and don’t want to bring it into this story. Ser, Rowan and all the other queer folks they’re gonna run into are just living their lives and that’s how we like it.
3. It’s gonna work out okay. Things will get heavy, people will cry, it won’t all be sunshine and roses all the time, but this isn’t a tragedy. Ser and Rowan’s tale is going to take them all over Telos and leave scars, literal and metaphorical, but at the end of the day this is a swashbuckling love story between two big ol’ queers and that’s all we want it to be.

Blade Maidens will be updating one-page-per-week, on Thursdays. Follow us on Twitter or Instagram, @blademaidens on both, for updates, rabid tweets, and some special extras every once in a while.

We would like to give special thank yous to Jason Large, for putting together this entire gorgeous website on his own and giving us an instruction manual we desperately needed, and Claire Napier, who provided fantastic editorial guidance for our first story arc, The Hunt.

And because I, Zoe, am writing these things I am going to go ahead and sneak in a thank you to Valentine for being an incredible artist and creative partner. Blade Maidens could not possibly exist without them, Ser and Rowan and everything we’ve got planned is as much their brain genius as it is mine and I’m incredibly grateful for her. HA, GOTCHA, VALENTINE. DEAL WITH IT.

Thanks again to all of you for giving us a shot, we love this story, this world, and these two sellsword human disasters with all of our hearts and hope you do too.

– Zoe